nspires it by
bidding us beware of imitating such men, and, in the ardor of his
rhetoric, even seems to regard them as hindrances and dangers to our
development. There is no inconsistency here. Emerson might logically
have gone one step further and raised inconsistency into a jewel. For
what is so useful, so educational, so inspiring, to a timid and
conservative man, as to do something inconsistent and regrettable? It
lends character to him at once. He breathes freer and is stronger for
the experience.

Emerson is no cosmopolitan. He is a patriot. He is not like Goethe,
whose sympathies did not run on national lines. Emerson has America in
his mind's eye all the time. There is to be a new religion, and it is to
come from America; a new and better type of man, and he is to be an
American. He not only cared little or nothing for Europe, but he cared
not much for the world at large. His thought was for the future of this
country. You cannot get into any chamber in his mind which is below this
chamber of patriotism. He loves the valor of Alexander and the grace of
the Oxford athlete; but he loves them not for themselves. He has a use
for them. They are grist to his mill and powder to his gun. His
admiration of them he subordinates to his main purpose,--they are his
blackboard and diagrams. His patriotism is the backbone of his
significance. He came to his countrymen at a time when they lacked, not
thoughts, but manliness. The needs of his own particular public are
always before him.

"It is odd that our people should have, not water on the brain, but
a little gas there. A shrewd foreigner said of the Americans that
'whatever they say has a little the air of a speech.'"

"I shall not need to go into an enumeration of our national defects
and vices which require this Order of Censors in the State.... The
timidity of our public opinion is our disease, or, shall I say, the
publicness of opinion, the absence of private opinion."

"Our measure of success is the moderation and low level of an
individual's judgment. Dr. Channing's piety and wisdom had such
weight in Boston that the popular idea of religion was whatever this
eminent divine held."

"Let us affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity, the squalid
contentment of the times."

The politicians he scores constantly.

"Who that sees the meanness of our politics but congratulates
Washington that he is long already wrapped in his shroud